Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea (funny how evil dictators love the word "democratic", eh?) was invaded in the end by Vietnam. Feel free to correct me but I think it was brought on by Pol Pot and his folks carrying out attacks into Vietnam. I'm not too sure of the details but Vietname and Cambodia's relationships have been pretty thorny over the years. Pol Pot was definitely a nasty piece of work.
Lots of terrorists out there that aren't muslim. Terror attacks didn't start on the 11th September 2001 and alas unrelated groups haven't stopped acts of violence since then. Your thoughts on: Timothy McVeigh, the IRA, the UDA, ETA... ?
Muslim=terrorist just isn't going to get us anywhere my friend any more than Irish=terrorist did for the last 40 years. From a European perspective many more terrorist acts over the last 100 years have been perpetrated by supposed believers in other religions, primarily the Christian faith.
Red flagging anybody who travels to or from Pakistan isn't going to help us: in the UK at least we have a significant minority population, perfectly law abiding, who have relatives there. I'd be interested in hearing from police or customs people who might have experience of how effective immigration controls on N.I.->mainland UK and USA->N.I. had on the Irish terror activities.
cheers for informative response! that sounds a lot more realistic to me. I'd guessed this side of the pond (the UK) we're only hearing the most crazy stories but good to hear more grounded info.
I'd assume in the UK that hospital bills wouldn't be added in - we've got the National Health Service which means free health care for all (discussion about whether you consider this is up to quality elsewhere please, I've been pretty satisfied in my 40 years of knocks and breaks and an interesting tropical disease).
Otherwise I guess it's similar: I've not actually ever pursued something through the courts. I once managed to damage my ankle on a paving slab in central London but I guess like most people decided that spending a tenner on some tubigrip bandages and aspirins was far simpler and less painful than trying to take the council to court, ending up loads of time and money out of pocket.
Very pretty rocket. It goes 100 metres up in the air then down again. I appreciate the complexity of this task and praise the team... but... how does this scale to going orbital? links and info welcomed.
I agree that 17 and 18 year olds should be treated as adults, they should be encouraged to grow into maturity. When I was school librarian in a small town in Scotland, I sat down with the small group that age and told them I was going to give them a lot more slack, that they could treat the school library as their common room (they didn't have another one). They could go into my office where the kettle was and make a cup of tea / coffee any time as long as they cleared their cups up afterwards (and put one on for me:-) ). I felt it was important that they were treated more like adults than kids.
However younger pubescent kids are not mature adults. They have to be treated differently, supported differently. I agree kids should have some recourse to stand up to bad teachers - I remember as kids we saw injustices and had no way of reporting them - but equally teachers need to be protected against unfounded attacks by kids. I remember the first thing we did as a class of 13 year olds with a new teacher was to see how far we could push them, if we could break them and control them. I'm sure we weren't the only kids in the world who did this. Teachers also need protection against pupil harrassment. Kids don't understand the full effect of their actions all the time.
1.65 Trillion dollars. Hmmm. To misquote Asterix, "these Americans are crazy".
What happens when this kind of call for money hits the US legal system? don't judges just give the prosecuting lawyers a hard stare and say "don't be silly, come back tomorrow with a sensible figure" ?
Over the other side of the pond we hear now and again about people sueing for stupid money, ooh, a million dollars when they twist their ankles on a broken paving stone or spilling hot coffee down themselves. Don't USian judges just turn round and offer sensible amounts ("so you've damaged your ankle on that broken paving slab and you'll be off work for two weeks, ok you earn 2000 dollars a month so how about we say 1000 dollars to you and another fine of 500 dollars to the local city council to make them pay for somebody to come out and fix that sidewalk"). Or is it just the first round of hyper-inflated horse trading Monty Python style?
Can somebody give me more details on what US immigration (and indeed other countries) reserve the right to do to my suitcase when I travel in? I noticed in a flight magazine when travelling UK->Italy that a company was selling locks "approved by US Immigration, they have the keys to this lock so they can open your luggage without damaging it" (or similar text). This rather freaked me out as I trust 99.999% of the immigration officers but I'm afraid I am a little cynical about human nature, just needs to be one corrupt official and there goes my expensive all weather coat/Christmas presents for my friend/ etc.
I don't mind if somebody asks me to open my luggage in front of them and checks through it but I am a bit unhappy about the idea of immigration officers either requiring me to leave my bag open for them or reserving the right to smash up my luggage. If they smash their way into my bags do they refund me for damages? Or am I considered a potential terrorist threat if I don't purchase US authorities approved luggage?
Conversations with various friends of different nationalities suggest that the UK might have done a better job than the French or the Belgians when retreating from their empires - it would be interesting to examine this further; I think the USA would be wise to learn from these countries mistakes. Anecdotally, it's been suggested that the former colonies of UK are more well disposed towards their occupiers than those of France or Belgium due to some (and definitely not all) of their actions.
A counter statement might be "what goes around comes around".
Or, a history lesson: empires rise and empires fall. Be nice to people on the way up, and they might be nice to your children as your country declines in importance.
naive outside question (excuse my ignorance) - you say "the non-optimal shape of the blimp compared to a balloon" - to my eyes it looks like blimps are more aerodynamic so I would have thought more efficient at moving through the air. Could you expand on what you mean by non optimal? cheers!
"You overestimate the integrity of scientists and the degree of peer-review."
Well said. Science is always political as we're all human. Even those computer scientists who are so pure (notification of bias: I work alongside computer scientists).
Computer scientists are susceptible to the same pressures as every other field - while their work may be more transparent and accountable, their choice of topics may be biased by the social or political environment. Lots of money/kudos/promotions in field X rather than field Y? well guess which fields they focus on?! Govt leaders offer huge chunk of money to solve problem A and cut funding for problem B - guess which is of interest to university computer scientists?
They are trying to build up their little fiefdoms just like every other sphere of working life, trying to get their papers into the fashionable/highly rated conferences and journals. Maybe avoiding tackling problems that are high risk so their department doesn't look bad in the assessment year.
Maybe the results in computer science are more easy to peer review and identify as being well derived or falsified but I'd say the whole surrounding territory is just as messed up -and human - as every other field.
10 year old saloon car not a bus, but definitely unhappy at over 85 mph, not a year old rental car that can accelerate like a sports car. Actually it was so unhappy I buggered the wheel bearings on one side on autobahns but then I learnt a useful lesson - if you're going to have a car problem with a VW, do it in Germany. Local garage near our mates house took it in and fixed it for the next morning, worked late to do it. Fantastic. We bought the guy a handful of bottles of beer and he said "thanks, but it's just my job you know". German mechanic, you are a superb ambassador for your country!
On the fatalities front of course there are multiple factors, hey perhaps German drivers are better trained / more careful than US drivers, perhaps vehicle standards are higher so less crashes caused by faulty vehicles, who knows. I'm still cautious of this high speed travelling in just two lanes though, I believe even in Germany they are starting to bring in more speed limits on the autobahns as cars today can go so stupidly fast. As has been noted elsewhere, it doesn't matter if you are the safest driver on the road and have the best reflexes and the best quality car, it's not just about you. It's also about the effect your driving has on the less confident/aware/ trained drivers. Hence my point about the porsche drivers - they may have been happy driving at 140mph and going right up to my rear bumper and flicking their lights on and off, but I'd bet that on occasion that kind of behaviour has forced a mistake in the other driver (pulling over and hitting a truck or the side of the road, slamming on brakes and the porsche crashing, accelerating too hard and then losing control etc). It's a shared environment, so my thoughts are that it's about an environment that is safe for the weakest, not strongest.
No, I think it needs to be amended to: "the software designers are arrogant and haven't bothered communicating with their public".
Anybody who makes global statements like that, well you got to check out where they are coming from. On slashdot this line regularly appears, "I am an expert with N number of years experience, (X) is obvious, (X) is easy, anybody who doesn't think so is stupid, come back when you have 10, 20 years experience before daring to complain".
German system better, accidents are rare? I'd welcome some stats on that. It would be really interesting to compare the number of accidents on autobahns in Germany with freeways in the USA and perhaps motorways in the UK where I'm from.
I have to say as a British driver I found the 2-lane (in each direction) autobahns bloody scary with the speed differential: once I drove across Germany with a couple of mates in an old VW saloon and the experience of having to pull out from behind a convoy of trucks going at barely 55-60 mph into a lane going possibly 80mph faster than was terrifying on occasion. You have to overtake or sit behind trucks for hours. You'd look in your mirror, once, twice, see an open road behind you, signal, pull out, and the next thing you've got two or three porsches right up your tail - they really come close, bumper to bumper - flicking their headlights at you because they want you out of there. Our old saloon heaved its way up 80mph and crawled past the line of trucks on more than one occasion with the speed freaks flicking their lights and intimidating us till we got out of the way.
I've been driving for 20 years so I'm confident enough just to ignore these guys and let them wait, but I can see this must be pretty frightening for less confident drivers. Personally I can't see how having 80mph differentials between two lanes of traffic aids road safety, and even if you're the best driver in the world, those porsche drivers really do come to ridiculously close distances, I bet a few of them die every year as a result of minor speed changes or road situations that they can't react to in time.
But I definitely agree with you - US roads are sooooo boring, drove coast to coast a couple of years back. I guess you guys have got the space to do it but I definitely agree on long hauls this makes driving really boring, I can see driver inattention accidents happening more (plus much much less traffic than your typical European city to city motorway run).
Post up the stats on comparative accident rates, I'd love to take a look. cheers.
stand corrected: but work in NL sounds good!
on
Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 1
Fair call. I stand corrected.
Actually my parent country (the UK) taught me some mad stuff then I was growing up, go check up ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alp habet) - that did my head in for sure. But no excuse for not reading the posting for sure.
Hey grandparent, what jobs are going? Living in the Netherlands, now that would be fine....
Where? I need a post doc in about 3 months! Oh... they are in the USA... ummm.. never mind... bit of a scary place for outsiders to be living these days. (Seriously guys, you got to work on your PR, there's a few people I know who've crossed the USA off the places they'll consider moving to on the grounds that they feel they'll be treated poorly in immigration and when they are living there) .
Hi all - so a naive newbie question about flash drives: their operational life is less than hard drives, but how much so?
How about a flash drive in a shared student house firewall box? I've been running Ipcop on an old pc to support a house full of college students who probably all go on line for a couple of hours each day. It seems like overkill to have a big old pc consuming a lot of electricity for this simple job. I love the idea of swapping out the old pc for something a lot smaller and tidier running ipcop off the flash drive as an embedded firewall. My question is - how long would a flash drive last if you're saying it won't last as long a hard drive? I know that's kind of "how long's a piece of string" but can you offer any estimates? weeks? months? a year? two years? cheers!
"or has a family with at least 2 kids will make use of the space in their vehicle"
You need an SUV is you're going to have two kids? OMG! how did humanity survive up till now? How did my parents fit three of us in the back of a saloon car in the 70s? does that mean I was an abused child?:-)
Sure if you've got an SUV then "you will make use of the space in the vehicle" but it doesn't mean you *need* it, it's still a luxury. On that stance if you bought a school bus you'd argue that you'd make use of the space in the bus to transport your kids. Doesn't mean you need every family needs a school bus. I agree with you though generalisations are bad. However my experience is people tend to really over-spec the vehicle they need, and sometimes for flimsy reasons. Just look at the kind of work Model T Fords got put to 80 years ago, check their technical specification, poorer than a modern micro-hatchback on most counts I'd guess.
Yup, I'm British, I've studied history, I've travelled to some of the places the British drew lines across. I'm aware of that, I'm aware that our contribution started at least as far back as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreemen t), and that Iraq as a modern nation state came out of that at least in part. Hence my original post which was intended to imply "please learn some lessons from our mistakes".
I'm glad we agree ethnic and cultural aspects of identity are very important and should be taken into account. As a PhD student using ethnographical methods in my research, I'd like to paraphrase greater writers than I'll ever be and say: it just isn't simple, identity is a complex thing. Hence my concern at the grandparent post statement:
"The establishment of a Kurdistan is really going to piss off Iran. Good. It will also piss off Turkey. Sucks to be them. Maybe they should have let us invade through the north too, a couple of years ago."
Unfortunately, the impression I have is that this typifies the thinking of people who have way too much influence over how things will turn out. Such measured thinking isn't going to get us anywhere. I will be honest and say I have no simple solution for the mess, save that a long period of dialogue will be required and several nations who seek influence will have to behave responsibly.
Word of advice from the British Empire: things get really sticky later on down the line when outsiders draw lines on maps and tell locals how it's going to be.
I travel round different countries on work. I'm afraid I don't have the time to learn half a dozen different currencies by knowing the texture pattern of the faces. I am not from the US so I have no idea what the difference is between a new/old dollar bill. I just want to fly into an airport, take out some cash from an ATM, put it into my wallet and not have to spend five minutes in every shop/ bar pulling out all the notes and flipping through them to find the right ones to pay for my purchase. Every time I do that I feel like I've got a big neon sign over my head saying "mug me". As a fully sighted person, I find clearly different colours with distinct designs and a clear numerical value work for me. Plus I'd agree with other posters, get rid of one dollar notes and bring in coins for ones and twos.
"You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel"? Seems like it gets pretty bloody chilly in places like Canada and Finland in the winter and you get mighty cool if not plain freezing if you don't have any fuel. Damn those oil guys don't know much, do they?
Slashdot Mirror
Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea (funny how evil dictators love the word "democratic", eh?) was invaded in the end by Vietnam. Feel free to correct me but I think it was brought on by Pol Pot and his folks carrying out attacks into Vietnam. I'm not too sure of the details but Vietname and Cambodia's relationships have been pretty thorny over the years. Pol Pot was definitely a nasty piece of work.
remind me, is this a dupe posting?
Lots of terrorists out there that aren't muslim. Terror attacks didn't start on the 11th September 2001 and alas unrelated groups haven't stopped acts of violence since then. Your thoughts on: Timothy McVeigh, the IRA, the UDA, ETA... ?
Muslim=terrorist just isn't going to get us anywhere my friend any more than Irish=terrorist did for the last 40 years. From a European perspective many more terrorist acts over the last 100 years have been perpetrated by supposed believers in other religions, primarily the Christian faith.
Red flagging anybody who travels to or from Pakistan isn't going to help us: in the UK at least we have a significant minority population, perfectly law abiding, who have relatives there. I'd be interested in hearing from police or customs people who might have experience of how effective immigration controls on N.I.->mainland UK and USA->N.I. had on the Irish terror activities.
cheers for informative response! that sounds a lot more realistic to me. I'd guessed this side of the pond (the UK) we're only hearing the most crazy stories but good to hear more grounded info.
I'd assume in the UK that hospital bills wouldn't be added in - we've got the National Health Service which means free health care for all (discussion about whether you consider this is up to quality elsewhere please, I've been pretty satisfied in my 40 years of knocks and breaks and an interesting tropical disease).
Otherwise I guess it's similar: I've not actually ever pursued something through the courts. I once managed to damage my ankle on a paving slab in central London but I guess like most people decided that spending a tenner on some tubigrip bandages and aspirins was far simpler and less painful than trying to take the council to court, ending up loads of time and money out of pocket.
Very pretty rocket. It goes 100 metres up in the air then down again. I appreciate the complexity of this task and praise the team... but... how does this scale to going orbital? links and info welcomed.
I agree that 17 and 18 year olds should be treated as adults, they should be encouraged to grow into maturity. When I was school librarian in a small town in Scotland, I sat down with the small group that age and told them I was going to give them a lot more slack, that they could treat the school library as their common room (they didn't have another one). They could go into my office where the kettle was and make a cup of tea / coffee any time as long as they cleared their cups up afterwards (and put one on for me :-) ). I felt it was important that they were treated more like adults than kids.
However younger pubescent kids are not mature adults. They have to be treated differently, supported differently. I agree kids should have some recourse to stand up to bad teachers - I remember as kids we saw injustices and had no way of reporting them - but equally teachers need to be protected against unfounded attacks by kids. I remember the first thing we did as a class of 13 year olds with a new teacher was to see how far we could push them, if we could break them and control them. I'm sure we weren't the only kids in the world who did this. Teachers also need protection against pupil harrassment. Kids don't understand the full effect of their actions all the time.
1.65 Trillion dollars. Hmmm. To misquote Asterix, "these Americans are crazy".
What happens when this kind of call for money hits the US legal system? don't judges just give the prosecuting lawyers a hard stare and say "don't be silly, come back tomorrow with a sensible figure" ?
Over the other side of the pond we hear now and again about people sueing for stupid money, ooh, a million dollars when they twist their ankles on a broken paving stone or spilling hot coffee down themselves. Don't USian judges just turn round and offer sensible amounts ("so you've damaged your ankle on that broken paving slab and you'll be off work for two weeks, ok you earn 2000 dollars a month so how about we say 1000 dollars to you and another fine of 500 dollars to the local city council to make them pay for somebody to come out and fix that sidewalk"). Or is it just the first round of hyper-inflated horse trading Monty Python style?
Can somebody give me more details on what US immigration (and indeed other countries) reserve the right to do to my suitcase when I travel in? I noticed in a flight magazine when travelling UK->Italy that a company was selling locks "approved by US Immigration, they have the keys to this lock so they can open your luggage without damaging it" (or similar text). This rather freaked me out as I trust 99.999% of the immigration officers but I'm afraid I am a little cynical about human nature, just needs to be one corrupt official and there goes my expensive all weather coat/Christmas presents for my friend/ etc.
I don't mind if somebody asks me to open my luggage in front of them and checks through it but I am a bit unhappy about the idea of immigration officers either requiring me to leave my bag open for them or reserving the right to smash up my luggage. If they smash their way into my bags do they refund me for damages? Or am I considered a potential terrorist threat if I don't purchase US authorities approved luggage?
Conversations with various friends of different nationalities suggest that the UK might have done a better job than the French or the Belgians when retreating from their empires - it would be interesting to examine this further; I think the USA would be wise to learn from these countries mistakes. Anecdotally, it's been suggested that the former colonies of UK are more well disposed towards their occupiers than those of France or Belgium due to some (and definitely not all) of their actions.
I think you mean 5 cents - 0.05 dollars per page? that would make 27.50 a book.
A counter statement might be "what goes around comes around".
Or, a history lesson: empires rise and empires fall. Be nice to people on the way up, and they might be nice to your children as your country declines in importance.
naive outside question (excuse my ignorance) - you say "the non-optimal shape of the blimp compared to a balloon" - to my eyes it looks like blimps are more aerodynamic so I would have thought more efficient at moving through the air. Could you expand on what you mean by non optimal? cheers!
"You overestimate the integrity of scientists and the degree of peer-review."
/highly rated conferences and journals. Maybe avoiding tackling problems that are high risk so their department doesn't look bad in the assessment year.
Well said. Science is always political as we're all human. Even those computer scientists who are so pure (notification of bias: I work alongside computer scientists).
Computer scientists are susceptible to the same pressures as every other field - while their work may be more transparent and accountable, their choice of topics may be biased by the social or political environment. Lots of money/kudos/promotions in field X rather than field Y? well guess which fields they focus on?! Govt leaders offer huge chunk of money to solve problem A and cut funding for problem B - guess which is of interest to university computer scientists?
They are trying to build up their little fiefdoms just like every other sphere of working life, trying to get their papers into the fashionable
Maybe the results in computer science are more easy to peer review and identify as being well derived or falsified but I'd say the whole surrounding territory is just as messed up -and human - as every other field.
10 year old saloon car not a bus, but definitely unhappy at over 85 mph, not a year old rental car that can accelerate like a sports car. Actually it was so unhappy I buggered the wheel bearings on one side on autobahns but then I learnt a useful lesson - if you're going to have a car problem with a VW, do it in Germany. Local garage near our mates house took it in and fixed it for the next morning, worked late to do it. Fantastic. We bought the guy a handful of bottles of beer and he said "thanks, but it's just my job you know". German mechanic, you are a superb ambassador for your country!
/aware/ trained drivers. Hence my point about the porsche drivers - they may have been happy driving at 140mph and going right up to my rear bumper and flicking their lights on and off, but I'd bet that on occasion that kind of behaviour has forced a mistake in the other driver (pulling over and hitting a truck or the side of the road, slamming on brakes and the porsche crashing, accelerating too hard and then losing control etc). It's a shared environment, so my thoughts are that it's about an environment that is safe for the weakest, not strongest.
On the fatalities front of course there are multiple factors, hey perhaps German drivers are better trained / more careful than US drivers, perhaps vehicle standards are higher so less crashes caused by faulty vehicles, who knows. I'm still cautious of this high speed travelling in just two lanes though, I believe even in Germany they are starting to bring in more speed limits on the autobahns as cars today can go so stupidly fast. As has been noted elsewhere, it doesn't matter if you are the safest driver on the road and have the best reflexes and the best quality car, it's not just about you. It's also about the effect your driving has on the less confident
No, I think it needs to be amended to: "the software designers are arrogant and haven't bothered communicating with their public".
Anybody who makes global statements like that, well you got to check out where they are coming from. On slashdot this line regularly appears, "I am an expert with N number of years experience, (X) is obvious, (X) is easy, anybody who doesn't think so is stupid, come back when you have 10, 20 years experience before daring to complain".
German system better, accidents are rare? I'd welcome some stats on that. It would be really interesting to compare the number of accidents on autobahns in Germany with freeways in the USA and perhaps motorways in the UK where I'm from.
I have to say as a British driver I found the 2-lane (in each direction) autobahns bloody scary with the speed differential: once I drove across Germany with a couple of mates in an old VW saloon and the experience of having to pull out from behind a convoy of trucks going at barely 55-60 mph into a lane going possibly 80mph faster than was terrifying on occasion. You have to overtake or sit behind trucks for hours. You'd look in your mirror, once, twice, see an open road behind you, signal, pull out, and the next thing you've got two or three porsches right up your tail - they really come close, bumper to bumper - flicking their headlights at you because they want you out of there. Our old saloon heaved its way up 80mph and crawled past the line of trucks on more than one occasion with the speed freaks flicking their lights and intimidating us till we got out of the way.
I've been driving for 20 years so I'm confident enough just to ignore these guys and let them wait, but I can see this must be pretty frightening for less confident drivers. Personally I can't see how having 80mph differentials between two lanes of traffic aids road safety, and even if you're the best driver in the world, those porsche drivers really do come to ridiculously close distances, I bet a few of them die every year as a result of minor speed changes or road situations that they can't react to in time.
But I definitely agree with you - US roads are sooooo boring, drove coast to coast a couple of years back. I guess you guys have got the space to do it but I definitely agree on long hauls this makes driving really boring, I can see driver inattention accidents happening more (plus much much less traffic than your typical European city to city motorway run).
Post up the stats on comparative accident rates, I'd love to take a look. cheers.
well said. Nicely argued, concise.
Fair call. I stand corrected.
p habet) - that did my head in for sure. But no excuse for not reading the posting for sure.
Actually my parent country (the UK) taught me some mad stuff then I was growing up, go check up ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Al
Hey grandparent, what jobs are going? Living in the Netherlands, now that would be fine....
Where? I need a post doc in about 3 months! Oh... they are in the USA... ummm.. never mind... bit of a scary place for outsiders to be living these days. (Seriously guys, you got to work on your PR, there's a few people I know who've crossed the USA off the places they'll consider moving to on the grounds that they feel they'll be treated poorly in immigration and when they are living there) .
Hi all - so a naive newbie question about flash drives: their operational life is less than hard drives, but how much so?
How about a flash drive in a shared student house firewall box? I've been running Ipcop on an old pc to support a house full of college students who probably all go on line for a couple of hours each day. It seems like overkill to have a big old pc consuming a lot of electricity for this simple job. I love the idea of swapping out the old pc for something a lot smaller and tidier running ipcop off the flash drive as an embedded firewall. My question is - how long would a flash drive last if you're saying it won't last as long a hard drive? I know that's kind of "how long's a piece of string" but can you offer any estimates? weeks? months? a year? two years? cheers!
"or has a family with at least 2 kids will make use of the space in their vehicle"
:-)
You need an SUV is you're going to have two kids? OMG! how did humanity survive up till now? How did my parents fit three of us in the back of a saloon car in the 70s? does that mean I was an abused child?
Sure if you've got an SUV then "you will make use of the space in the vehicle" but it doesn't mean you *need* it, it's still a luxury. On that stance if you bought a school bus you'd argue that you'd make use of the space in the bus to transport your kids. Doesn't mean you need every family needs a school bus. I agree with you though generalisations are bad. However my experience is people tend to really over-spec the vehicle they need, and sometimes for flimsy reasons. Just look at the kind of work Model T Fords got put to 80 years ago, check their technical specification, poorer than a modern micro-hatchback on most counts I'd guess.
It aint that simple as they say...
n t), and that Iraq as a modern nation state came out of that at least in part. Hence my original post which was intended to imply "please learn some lessons from our mistakes".
Yup, I'm British, I've studied history, I've travelled to some of the places the British drew lines across. I'm aware of that, I'm aware that our contribution started at least as far back as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreeme
I'm glad we agree ethnic and cultural aspects of identity are very important and should be taken into account. As a PhD student using ethnographical methods in my research, I'd like to paraphrase greater writers than I'll ever be and say: it just isn't simple, identity is a complex thing. Hence my concern at the grandparent post statement:
"The establishment of a Kurdistan is really going to piss off Iran. Good. It will also piss off Turkey. Sucks to be them. Maybe they should have let us invade through the north too, a couple of years ago."
Unfortunately, the impression I have is that this typifies the thinking of people who have way too much influence over how things will turn out. Such measured thinking isn't going to get us anywhere. I will be honest and say I have no simple solution for the mess, save that a long period of dialogue will be required and several nations who seek influence will have to behave responsibly.
"Divide Iraq into three regions"
Word of advice from the British Empire: things get really sticky later on down the line when outsiders draw lines on maps and tell locals how it's going to be.
I travel round different countries on work. I'm afraid I don't have the time to learn half a dozen different currencies by knowing the texture pattern of the faces. I am not from the US so I have no idea what the difference is between a new/old dollar bill. I just want to fly into an airport, take out some cash from an ATM, put it into my wallet and not have to spend five minutes in every shop/ bar pulling out all the notes and flipping through them to find the right ones to pay for my purchase. Every time I do that I feel like I've got a big neon sign over my head saying "mug me". As a fully sighted person, I find clearly different colours with distinct designs and a clear numerical value work for me. Plus I'd agree with other posters, get rid of one dollar notes and bring in coins for ones and twos.
"You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel"? Seems like it gets pretty bloody chilly in places like Canada and Finland in the winter and you get mighty cool if not plain freezing if you don't have any fuel. Damn those oil guys don't know much, do they?